Daniele Rugo

EXACTITUDE AND PARTIALITY: MERLEAU-PONTY AND NANCY ON CINEMA

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to questions of perception,

subjectivity and objectivity, embodiment and movement, permeate a great number of

contemporary reflections on cinema.i The critical and explicatory force of the theoretical

frameworks founded on Merleau-Ponty’s work are often deployed in discussions of ontology

of cinema, spectatorship, cinematic sensoriality, and affect. In fact, Merleau-Ponty’s

emphasis on cinema, as best suited “to express man in his visible conduct…thought by

gestures, man by behavior, the soul by the body,”ii is often invoked as the most lucid and

powerful alternative to Deleuze’s Bergsonism. While it is not impossible to imagine some

reconciliation between Merleau-Ponty and Bergson, or Merleau-Ponty and Deleuzeiii, the

former’s work is often used in an attempt to define cinema—its aesthetic codes and value for

philosophy—beyond the confines of Deleuze’s framework. Considering the relative scarcity

of explicit references to cinema in Merleau-Ponty’s writing, the phenomenological school in

film theory is largely built on the foundations of his Phenomenology of Perception, the essay

“Eye and Mind,” and the unfinished The Visible and the Invisible.

While it is possible, as Sobchack and others show, to illuminate film through

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, it is more difficult to find within Merleau-Ponty’s work a

coherent and systematic reflection on cinema. This absence or resistance is seldom

interrogated in favor of arguments that attempt to elucidate the many tools that Merleau-

Ponty’s philosophy offers to the philosophical (but not only philosophical) understanding of

film. This article is concerned with what this absence might reveal about Merleau-Ponty’s

thinking of cinema, and cinema in general. The first section addresses the reasons why

Merleau-Ponty stopped short of an explicit discussion of film in order to see how this might

open an interesting set of conceptual avenues. The second part of the discussion builds on the

first to show how what Merleau-Ponty found problematic about cinema might turn out to be

one of cinema’s most resourceful features. The work of Jean-Luc Nancy, so close and yet so

distant from Merleau-Ponty’s approach, moves precisely from the point at which Merleau-

Ponty stopped. Furthermore, Nancy demonstrates that Merleau-Ponty’s neglect of cinema

cannot be justified on the grounds that cinema had not yet developed its full potential, since

Nancy’s analysis links contemporary cinematic instances back to cinema’s beginning. To

show how film is apt at capturing the essential excess and ambiguity of the world, the article

will turn to the Lebanese film Je Veux Voir (Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, 2008),

which offers a powerful instance of cinema’s simultaneous precision and partiality.

1. The Phenomenology of Film

While in the 1980s film theorist Dudley Andrew could still complain of the little

attention that phenomenology had received as a methodology for the study of cinema iv,

phenomenological analyses of film have now become mainstream. This is largely thanks to

the work of Vivian Sobchack and Laura Marks, who in different ways have produced new

methodological approaches to film that rely extensively on Merleau-Ponty’s work. In her

seminal work The Address of the Eye, Sobchack finds in the French philosopher a powerful

alternative to both Marxist and psychoanalytic interpretations of cinema by insisting on the

idea that a film addresses its viewer and communicates experience through experience.v

Marks, on the other hand, emphasizes Merleau-Ponty’s work on the mimetic body and its

ability for compassionate involvement rather than abstraction. As Helen Fielding writes,

“drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s insights into synesthesia, Marks explores how certain images

are thick with other sensual experiences, experiences that will differ depending on the

sedimented and habitual body we bring to them.”vi It is largely, albeit not only, to Merleau-

Ponty that Marks and othersvii owe the idea of the essential hapticity of vision, the ability of

the eyes to touch, to touch as a hand can. Describing vision in The Visible and The Invisible,

Merleau-Ponty talks about the look that, “envelops, palpates, espouses the visible things,”

and describes the “palpation of the eye” as a variant of “tactile palpation.”viii While this

conflation of vision and touch has attracted considerable criticisms, chiefly in Derrida’s work

on the figures of touch and Jean-Luc Nancyix, the idea of haptic vision as non-instrumental

and capable of interrupting the figure-ground relationship has had broad resonance among

film theorists.

In the work of Sobchack, the turn towards Merleau-Ponty is invoked as an attempt to

describe experience, and in particular to do justice to the richness and plenitude of cinematic

experience. Sobchack sees this focus on the experiential as an antidote to psychoanalytic and

Marxist reductions. The aim is to achieve an interrogation of vision that goes further than

these perspectives ever could, describing vision as embodied, performed and signifying, but

also as essentially resistant to language. Sobchack writes that, “part of the appeal of

phenomenology lies in its potential for opening up and destabilizing language in the very

process of its description of the phenomena of experience.”x The declared goal of the work is

to, “describe the origin, locus, and existential significance of cinematic vision and the film

experience.”xi From the start Sobchack engages less with Merleau-Ponty’s writing on cinema,

instead focusing on the general framework Merleau-Ponty offers for an ontology of vision

and a phenomenology of perception. In the opening passages of the book, Sobchack quotes

from The Visible and the Invisible to say that Merleau-Ponty’s concern with the “living

exchange of perception and expression, with the sensuous contours of language, with

meaning and its signification born not abstractly but concretely from the surface contact, the

fleshly dialogue, of human beings and the world together making sense sensible,”xii offers the

film theorist a set of crucial tools. For Sobchack, the idea of reciprocity between the perceiver

and the perceived founds the cinematic experience. According to this framework of

reciprocity the screen is not the surface on which we see something, but the site of a “seeing-

with.” At the screen two looks meet, and the perceiver begins to see with or according to the

perceived. The perceptual gestures of the film lead the perceiver to reappraise the world, to

forge a new sensory language. The seer and the seen are therefore co-emergent.

Furthermore Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye is predicated upon a reading of

cinema as essentially parallel to ordinary perception. This parallel is articulated quite

explicitly in expressions such as, “in a film as in life, perception and expression do not

originally oppose each other, and are not separated.”xiii Later Shobchack insists on the same

line by writing that Merleau-Ponty’s account of the, “structured, centered, inherent

“co/herence” of human experience seems just as applicable to the visual being of the visible

film.”xiv In her descriptions of the phenomenological method, Sobchack emphasizes how, for

Merleau-Ponty, phenomenological descriptions of our natural attitude towards the world

reveal an excess of the world with regard to both perception and expression. This is precisely

the point at which Merleau-Ponty shifts the emphasis of Husserl’s understanding of reduction

and moves into a different territory. Husserl’s transcendental reduction is reworked by

Merleau-Ponty in view of doing justice to the excess of the world with regard to our access to

it. Sobchack writes, “the lesson of the phenomenological description is that description is

never complete. Meaning as sense and significance can never be exhaustively articulated or

signified.”xv Thus, phenomenological description manages to return us to that excess, to the

acknowledgment that our perception is always in a sense imperfect, agitated by that which

remains outside of it: smudges, blurs, soft edges, invisibilities, incomplete intentionalities.

This point is confirmed by other commentators. Pierre Rodrigo, for instance, writes that while

Merleau-Ponty was developing his understanding of phenomenological reduction, he turned

to painting and cinema to make sense of the interaction between subject and world.xvi

Shobchack quotes Merleau-Ponty as saying that the reality of an object goes hand in hand

with a dissipation of form:

the visible object “is given as the infinite sum of an indefinite series of views in each of which the object is given but in none of which it is given exhaustively. It is not accidental for the object to be given to me in a “deformed” way, from the point of view [place] which I occupy. That is the price of its being ‘real’.”xvii

The conclusion that Sobchack reaches—that our engagement with cinema is both embodied

and reflective and that cinema not only refers to embodied experience, but makes use of it—

evolves from a close and illuminating reading of Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception, while

largely bypassing his remarks on cinema. The premise in question is expressed by Sobchack

at the beginning of her work:

Cinema thus transposes, without completely transforming, those modes of being alive and consciously embodied in the world that count for each of us as direct experience: as experience “centered” in that particular, situated, and solely occupied existence sensed first as “Here, where the world touches” and then as “Here, where the world is sensible; here, where I am.”xviii

Interestingly, Sobchack devotes only a couple of pages to Merleau-Ponty’s reading of

cinema. The only text that explicitly treats cinema, “The Film and the New Psychology,”

originally delivered as a lecture in 1945, receives only a brief mention and seems to simply

provide ancillary support for the argument of The Address of the Eye.

2. The neglect of neglect

Sobchack’s work is important not only because it provides the most sustained

phenomenological approach to film, but also because it speaks to a broader issue within

“cinematic” analyses of Merleau-Ponty. Most commentators who have attempted to present

Merleau-Ponty’s reading of cinema have had to perform a number of detours and have

largely neglected Merleau-Ponty’s own neglect of cinema. Merleau-Ponty, in fact, offers an

elaborate and illuminating ontology of the visible and of the image. As Francoise Dastur

writes, Merleau-Ponty’s question is, “from his first to his last book: what is vision.”xix In

many texts, but most explicitly perhaps in “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty interrogates

vision by articulating a critique of Descartes’s reduction of vision to thought. For Merleau-

Ponty, “The visible world and the world of my motor projects are each total parts of the same

Being. This extraordinary overlapping…forbids us to conceive of vision as an operation of

thought that would set up before the mind a picture or a representation of the world.” xx It is

precisely this reduction of vision to a “setting up before” that Merleau-Ponty reproaches in

Descartes’s work. For Descartes, vision does not exist without thought. Merleau-Ponty

summarizes his critique as follows:

everything we say and think of vision has to make a thought of it. When, for example, we wish to understand how we see the way objects are situated, we have no other recourse than to suppose the soul to be capable, knowing where the parts of its body are, of “transferring its attention from there” to all the points of space that lie in the prolongation of [i.e., beyond] the bodily members (PrP, 33/175).

Merleau-Ponty critiques Descartes for reducing the powers of vision to an intellectual

operation. Even if Descartes ultimately recognized the intervention of the body in visual

perception, and accounted then for a “doubling of vision,” he nonetheless submitted this

mixture of body and soul to intellectual understanding. As a result, vision becomes for

Descartes a mere form of operational thought. To this operational thought, Merleau-Ponty

opposes his “philosophy as thought-in-contact”; to the thought of seeing he opposes vision in

act (PrP 35/177).

Merleau-Ponty concludes that vision teaches us “that beings that are different,

‘exterior,’ foreign to one another, are yet absolutely together,” and that to look is to reach a

limit, an initiation to the world, where it is impossible to distinguish the perceiver and the

perceived (PrP 50/187). He writes, “the see-er does not appropriate what he sees; he merely

approaches it by looking, he opens himself to the world” (PrP 13/162).

These analyses have been considerably influential. Discussing cinematic and

televisual images, Oliver Fahle, for instance, identifies Merleau-Ponty as having established

for the first time the difference between the image and the visible, thus inaugurating a

disjointed intimacy that continues to animate theoretical approaches to cinema and moving

images more broadly. Fahle writes that Merleau-Ponty envisages this important distinction in

The Visible and the Invisible, without however formulating it explicitly. Following the

framework offered by Merleau-Ponty, Fahle writes that the image is, on the one hand, “the

focused and framed look…the visible, [and,] on the other hand, constitutes the space around,

the transversal movement that takes part in the birth of each vision.”xxi Fahle continues by

discussing Merleau-Ponty’s text on Cézanne. It is through Cézanne’s work that Merleau-

Ponty develops a conception of the image as “non-figurative, temporal and unlimited.”xxii In

other words, through the analyses of Cézanne’s work, which almost bracket the beginning

and the end of Merleau-Ponty’s published work (“Cézanne’s Doubt” is from 1941, while

“Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty’s last published essay, is from 1961), Merleau-Ponty

develops a new understanding of the visible as a field of possibility that does not exclude but

rather works with and through the invisible. Fahle continues and says, “if the invisible works

on the one hand beyond a limit that painting cannot attain, it is also on the other hand created

by painting itself.”xxiii

This recourse to texts other than the one that Merleau-Ponty devoted solely to cinema

might be due to the fact that, as Benjamin Labé writes, “the famous article ‘Film and The

New Psychology’ has a limited scope.”xxiv

“Eye and Mind” does contain one brief reference to cinema, at which Merleau-Ponty

arrives via a reflection on the depiction of movement. Here he writes that painting, “has made

itself a movement without displacement, a movement by vibration or radiation” (PrP 46/184),

and then claims that “Painting searches not for the outside of movement but for its secret

cyphers” (PrP 47/186). Between these two passages Merleau-Ponty asks and leaves open the

question of how cinema represents movement. He grants that cinema does portray movement,

but the answer as to the specificity of this portrayal does not dissipate the ambiguity. He asks,

“Is it, as we are inclined to believe, by copying more closely the changes of place? We may

presume not, since slow-motion shows a body floating among objects like an alga but not

moving itself” (PrP 46/185). If Merleau-Ponty leaves the question of cinema open and

dedicates only a limited treatment to it, he is more explicit on the question of photography,

from which—at the time when Merleau-Ponty was writing at least—cinema derived its

mechanism and its ontology. While painting offers “almost the same thing offered them by

real movements: a series of appropriately mixed, instantaneous glimpses” (PrP 46/184), the

photograph destroys the openness of time, time’s “metamorphosis” (PrP 47/186), which

“painting, in contrast, makes visible” (PrP 47/186). It is for this reason that Merleau-Ponty,

quoting Rodin, concludes that the photograph lies (PrP 47/186).

Merleau-Ponty had already expressed this disapproval of photography in his lectures

at the Sorbonne on child psychology. Here, reversing Luquet’s claim that because of its

mimetic power, photography gives us ““the most exact” representation of nature insofar as

we perceive it,” Merleau-Ponty writes that “instead, we must wonder if photographs really

represent the world as we see it.”xxv In her introduction to the volume, Talia Welsh rightly

writes that, for Merleau-Ponty, “our perception is not at all like that of a camera” (CPP xvii),

a point that Merleau-Ponty had already expressed in “Cezanne’s Doubt.” Here we read that it

is Cezanne who discovered that “the lived perspective, that which we actually perceive, is not

a geometric or photographic one.”xxvi The passage then remarks on cinema: “The objects we

see close at hand appear smaller, those far away seem larger than they do in a photograph.

(This can be seen in a movie, where a train approaches and gets bigger much faster than a

real train would under the same circumstances)” (SN 20-21/14).

Photography and film both miss what Merleau-Ponty, after Whitehead, calls the

“ragged edge of nature.”xxvii It is painting instead that provides Merleau-Ponty with the model

to understand phenomenological reduction differently than Husserl. The reduction Merleau-

Ponty is after is one that does not aim for closure and completeness, but rather for a contact

with the world, which does not exhaust the world’s meaning, but leaves open a fundamental

ambiguity. As Pierre Rodrigo explains, it is through painting that Merleau-Ponty arrives at

the idea that reduction “does not emerge from the free decision of an explicit subject.” xxviii

This reduction would be motivated, then, not by intentionality, but “by the thing-itself, that is

to say by the logic of experience.”xxix Reduction, then, does not reduce, but rather renews the

ambiguity, in fact reducing itself to it.

The first problem then that can be said to have left Merleau-Ponty dissatisfied with

cinema is that, in his eyes, cinema is not able to convey this essential ambiguity, this ongoing

birth, in the same way that painting does.

In the Phenomenology of Perception, cinema appears in a discussion on the

perception of objects in what he calls “natural perception.” Here, Merleau-Ponty writes:

To see an object is either to have it in the margins of the visual field and to be able to focus on it, or actually to respond to this solicitation by focusing on it. When I focus on it, I anchor myself in it, but this “pausing” of the gaze is but a modality of its movement: I continue within one object the same exploration that, just a moment ago, surveyed all of them. With a single movement, I close off the landscape and open up the object.xxx

In natural perception I thus direct my gaze upon an area in order to disclose it. This disclosure

brings the area and its objects to life, while also excluding other areas, relegating them to the

background or periphery, thereby making them dormant. However, for Merleau-Pointy, in

film, something else occurs, and the perception afforded by cinema is altogether different.

Merleau-Ponty writes:

Compare this to a film where the camera focuses on an object and moves in to give us a close-up of it. In this case we can surely remember that we are seeing an ashtray or a character’s hand, but we do not actually identify it as such. This is because the screen has no horizons. (PhP 82/70)

Film and ordinary perception are thus markedly different. This difference is also perhaps

what motivates Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis, not on the cinematic image (the shot), but on

montage, as the essential feature of cinema.xxxi In the only text devoted uniquely to cinema,

“The Film and The New Psychology,” Merleau-Ponty insists on cinema’s uniqueness

residing in its power to assemble different views. Merleau-Ponty describes at length the

Kuleshov effect in order to assert how “melodic unity” (SN 67/54) is cinema’s essential

feature. This focus on rhythm returns in the Causeries from 1948. Here the philosopher

writes:

What matters is the selection of episodes to be represented and, in each one, the choice of shots that will be featured in the film, the length of time allotted to these elements, the order in which they are to be presented, the sound or words with which they are or are not to be accompanied. Taken together, all these factors contribute to form a particular overall cinematographical rhythm.xxxii

It is thus to the fragment that Merleau-Ponty assigns the potential of cinema, since it is the

collaboration among the fragments that constitutes a global rhythm.

In “The Film and The New Psychology,” Merleau-Ponty insists also on cinema’s

apparent inability to come to terms with, to lend itself to, the essential ambivalence of the

world. In the conference text he writes that “the perceived form is never perfect in real life,

that it always has blurs, smudges, and superfluous matter, as it were. Cinematographic drama

is, so to speak, finer-grained than real-life dramas: it takes place in a world that is more exact

than the real world” (SN 72/58). This passage highlights, in my view, one of the two main

reasons why Merleau-Ponty ultimately did not develop a coherent discourse on cinema:

namely, cinema is caught in an exactness that undermines its ability to establish a connection

with the world.

As Clelia Zernik writes, “There is thus a difference between cinematic perception and

ordinary perception: in ordinary perception there is a ‘disturbance’ that does not exist in

cinematic perception.”xxxiii Cinematic renditions of the world then are incapable of thinking

“the disturbance, the trembling of being in the world,”xxxiv because they are an idealized or

euphemistic version of ordinary experience.

For Merleau-Ponty, cinema essentially provides a clean version of perception, a

perception that is not disturbed, not prone to smudges and imperfections. The perception we

have in film is essentially a purified version of ordinary perceptual experience. This exactness

deprives cinema of the richness that for Merleau-Ponty derives precisely from the fact that

perception is never “clean.” This crucial distinction helps illuminate the place of film in

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy and shows why cinema plays a relatively minor role in his

philosophy.

A second reason that seems to motivate the neglect of film can be said to rest on

cinema’s incompleteness. For Merleau-Ponty, cinema is essentially an unaccomplished art.

The already mentioned Causeries provides evidence of this:

Cinema has yet to provide us with many films that are works of art from start to finish: its infatuation with stars, the sensationalism of the zoom, the twists and turns of plot and the intrusion of pretty pictures and witty dialogue, are all tempting pitfalls for films which chase success and, in so doing, eschew properly cinematic means of expression…there have scarcely been any films that are entirely filmic. (WP §4/97-98)

Cinema has yet to fulfill its potential. This idea of the incompleteness of film, its arrested

development, returns in other texts. For instance, in “The Sensible World and The World of

Expression,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “film is still as far as ever from offering us all that we

might have expected of it.”xxxv These remarks are made in the context of a discussion on

movement. Here film is said to promise a shift from the representation of movement to the

movement of representation, but cinema has not been able to meet this promise. Therefore,

for Merleau-Ponty, cinema is caught between a deadening exactness and a disappointing

partiality. It is because of these two apparently opposing forces that Merleau-Ponty sidelines

cinema.

The pairing of exactness and partiality provides an interesting moment for reflection.

Intuitively the two should not coexist, since they appear mutually exclusive. Yet their

coexistence, put forward by Merleau-Ponty, seems to renew rather than foreclose a thinking

of film. Guided by these two terms, Jean-Luc Nancy produces his own thought on cinema. As

I have demonstrated, for Merleau-Ponty cinema presents too neat a perception, and so is an

unaccomplished form of art. In contrast, for Nancy cinema is an always partial vision, and

because of this is also a resistance to worldview. While for Merleau-Ponty cinema cleanses

perception of its grain, omissions, flaws and smudges, for Nancy cinema emphasizes this

excess, this grain, this imperfection, and the blind spots, thus making cinema a more apt

reminder of the creation of the world. In his work on painting, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes his

understanding of the image on a register that does not coincide with representation. Nancy

similarly speaks of film as a form that is neither a “look at representation or a representative

look.”xxxvi Where Merleau-Ponty describes the painter’s vision as “ongoing birth,” Nancy

speaks of cinema as accompanying the creation of the world.

For Nancy the partiality of cinema—its resistance to presenting a totality, but also to

presenting itself as a total system of representation—produces an exact relation to the world,

one of which, for instance, the exact repetition implied by worldviews deprives us (EvF: 18).

Further, if this partiality produces a form of exactness, it is equally true that exactness itself is

achieved only as infinite incompleteness. The price of exactness is to accept itself as

partiality. The word “evidence,” which Nancy deploys to describe the operation of cinema in

his work on Kiarostami, names precisely this encounter between exactness and partiality.

In the following sections I will analyze what Nancy might intend for the pairing of

exactness and partiality, demonstrating how revealing and productive their coexistence is.

3. Creation and contingency

Nancy’s work on cinema is particularly interesting here, since it often insists on its

distance from phenomenology precisely by adopting and transforming a phenomenological

lexicon (evidence, the gaze, visibility). In an interview with the Italian journal Fata Morgana,

Nancy sets out to explain the relevance of cinema to his questioning of the world. xxxvii It is

worth stressing here that in Nancy’s thought the question of the world occupies a crucial

place. As I have discussed elsewhere,xxxviii Nancy decries Western philosophy’s tendency to

reduce the world to an object, instead identifying the question of the world in a circulation of

sense that discredits and unsettles every reduction. The world thus requires a twofold

rethinking. On the one hand it demands to be freed from those forces in the Western onto-

theological tradition that have delegated the determination of its sense to an otherworld. On

the other, the world needs to be thought beyond the neutralizing form to which it has been

restricted by the rationalist tradition’s alleged surpassing of transcendence (finitude as

intellectual privation, failure of human knowledge). Neither divine principles nor

reductionism, then, can guarantee or exhaust the sense of the world, for this sense is an

infinite strangeness, both a risk and an opportunity. Thinking, if it wants to do justice to the

world, must try to install itself in this strangeness, without attempting to reduce it. The sense

of the world is not guaranteed—if by this one implies a foundation and a destination—but is

constantly “in-the-making.” The world is at once both full of sense and without sense.

The fact that the world no longer has any (externally guaranteed) sense translates into

the recognition that the world is sense. On the one hand, then, we have nothing to secure

ourselves to—neither Divinity nor Reason, neither ultimate horizon nor Principle—but on the

other, this situation forces us to take on all the possibilities and forms of sense. This

withdrawal of guaranteed sense offers both the exhaustion of the idea of destination and the

emergence of a constant agitation. The world as that which is essentially inappropriable and

inextinguishable is the world in which our possibilities become our responsibilities and vice

versa, where every parcel of sense contributes to the sense of the world, without ever

concretizing itself into the completion of a totality. The sense of the world is thus always

partial (since its plurality forecloses the whole), but also, at once, always exact, since each

singularity expresses the world as such. Even though philosophy has proliferated and

developed various and differing worldviews, it has nevertheless concealed the thinking of the

world, for any worldview absorbs and dissolves the world in its vision.

For Nancy, film is a mode of resistance to worldviews in so far as it is what he calls a

“taking care of the world” (EvF, 18). Film produces always, since the beginning, a return to

the world’s strangeness or a return of the world as strange, articulating the differentiating

pressure of the singular. This singular pressure cannot and should not be mastered (partiality),

but exposed, acknowledged, and, as Nancy ultimately says, adored in its exactness (this tree,

this flower, this cloud)xxxix.

When thinking about cinema with Nancy it is therefore both a matter of thinking the

world again, and also of acknowledging the fact that this thought of the world will not elevate

us above it or allow us to penetrate it (EvF: 19). This thought will participate in what it thinks

about. The world captures and abandons us at the same time, in one thought and in one look.

Nancy’s discourse on film thus touches on the particular present of our world, a present that

is occupied by a definite trajectory.

Cinema manifests the world’s withdrawal from representation and therefore shows us

(this showing is precisely that which cannot be apprehended through and by illustration) that

it is a matter of adjusting our relation to it differently. The risk in not doing so is an

exacerbation of reductionist gestures. Nancy explains this in an interview with Pierre-

Philippe Jandin:

[T]he world isn’t an object at all anymore. And doesn’t this increasing sensitization of philosophy—perhaps it’s merely a resensitization after the entirety of rationalism made us believe that we could float above the sensible while despising it and only dipping our toes in it from time to time—consist in recovering the world?…But this world, which has become an object of knowledge, and of exploration and mastery, is at the same time a world where human beings’ presence—and perhaps this can be extended to the presence of living beings in general—has been pushed aside.xl

Philosophy’s return to the world does not simply construct a new representation of the

question of the world, which has occupied Nancy and upon which he has insisted throughout

his work. One could say that the argument that emerges explicitly with The Sense of The

World (1997), is still central to the two volumes of the deconstruction of Christianity—Dis-

Enclosure (2008) and Adoration (2012)—and in the recent What’s These Worlds Coming to?

(2014). In The Sense of The World, Nancy writes that philosophy today is concerned with

“the end of sources, the beginning of the dry excess of sense. No more parousia, no more

present, attested sense, but a completely different eschatology, another extremity, another

excess of sense.”xli In Adoration he reframes this argument by writing that our access to the

world takes place where “forces precede and follow us, where forces are not concerned with a

subject’s calculation and projection, but where one might rather say that a subject, by

welcoming these forces, by espousing their impetus, might have some chance of shaping

itself.”xlii Nancy insists that the world is nothing and this nothing is reality as such, for

example in the following phrase: “what I am in the eyes of an attentive other or what a form

or color—of a tree, a tool—is when I allow it to enter and go through me, to not remain

before me” (Ad, 84). In a world both full of and without sense, cinema continuously

addresses the fact that “everything refers back to everything and thus everything shows itself

through everything.”xliii

In this interview Nancy says that cinema “is the world in the act of being created”

(CTL n.p.). This happens because cinema triggers a process of dispossession of the world

precisely due to its ability to record what is revealed to it. Nancy explains this as follows:

I know what the use of a coffee maker is, its use, but if I start looking at it carefully and I separate it from the world of its use, I disconnect it from that world of uses…I put it in another world, which is a world where each thing shows itself for itself. (CTL n.p.)

Earlier in the text Nancy identifies this as the pleasure of mimesis, a pleasure that is not

simply a confirmation of cognition, but re-cognition, allowing someone really to know or to

rediscover the ordinary. This is cinema’s double operation: on the one hand it is a medium

that, as Nancy writes, “records everything and reproduces everything” (CTL n.p.), but on the

other this recording “neither reproduces nor records, but it shows how a world, how a

moment of the world is like in the making” (CTL n.p.). What is recorded is at the same time

created anew. It is because of this recording-as-creation that Nancy says that “cinema is in the

most interesting position” (CTL n.p.). In this sense cinema articulates the world in its creation

and this is one side of its exactness. This exactness could also be called “justice to the

singular,” inasmuch as cinema dissolves the object as a set of properties, an intellectual

possession of instrumental reason, and presents it for the first time. Nancy writes that, “what

happens at the beginning of a movie is really ex nihilo. This ex nihilo happens for us every

morning, but lasts a short time” (CTL n.p.). Cinema shows the world before significance

takes hold, shows a world whose sense is open, delivered to contingency and gratuity or, as

Nancy puts it, “every film proposes something which is a movement of the world, a birth, an

expansion” (CTL n.p.). What Nancy calls the “jouissance of cinema” (CTL n.p.) derives then

from cinema’s ability to show not just particular things, but the singular in the making, the

“creation itself of the world” (CTL n.p.). It is because film is delivered over to gratuity and

contingency that the partiality of cinema produces exactness, an exact relation to a world, the

renewal of sense rather than its closure under the pressure of acquired significations. The

recording of cinema produces not a capturing of sense, but its release. Nancy explains this

sense when he writes, “it is like a continuous creation of the world. In this sense Bazin said

that film has a beginning but it does not have an ending” (CTL n.p.). This exactness produces

a release of the sense of the world, rather than a closure.

This exactness can, however, only be achieved in and as partiality, only by remaining

as an unfinished work, otherwise cinema consigns itself to worldviews. Nancy opposes the

creation of the world, the release of its sense, to the capturing of sense proper of worldview.

He writes that in worldviews,

the world is related to one of the available models, diagrams. For example, the Christian vision sees the world as having been created by an omnipotent being and Humanist-Progressivist vision sees the world created by humans and so on. These visions of the world take you back to some instruments, some concepts, some images which are available, and provide rules of behavior. (CTL n.p.)

The exactness that emerges with cinema’s creation of the world comes from its partiality,

from cinema’s resistance to the attempts to enclose sense within a model. The partiality of

film can be said to rely on the contingency that for Nancy ultimately directs its decisions. In

order for cinema to be what Nancy calls a taking care of the world, cinema has to remove

itself from the available images of the world, which would provide it with pre-conceived

frames. Cinema instead must constantly refer itself to and ground its work in nothing. To this

effect Nancy writes that, “the World comes from nothingness; it is in the middle of

nothingness and around the world there are no other worlds…There are not any makers of

worlds and there is no need; there is pure contingency” (CTL, n.p.). Cinema needs to become

attuned to this nothingness. What Nancy is evoking here is the theme of creation ex nihilo,

which is prominent in the Western onto-theological tradition. For Nancy the creation of the

world happens not through the intervention of a demiurge crafting spurious matter, but as the

constant germination of nothing. “Nothing” then names both the creator as necessarily

disappearing in its own act, and its consequent displacement of any given position, “into a

transitivity by which it is, and is only, in any existence.”xliv

Given these premises it is understandable why Nancy often returns to accumulatio to

express this thought. In Corpus, he writes:

Creation as corpus: without a creator, empirical logos, random variety, extendable grouping, permanent modalization, an absence of plan and end—creation alone would be the end, meaning also that only bodies, every body, every mass, and every intersection or interface of the body, every male, every female, and their whole inoperative community, would provide the infinite ends of the techne of a world of bodies.xlv

The problem poses itself in these terms: the concept of creation produces the confusion of the

creator with its creatures, a confusion proper to a theism that is contemporaneous with

atheism. Most cosmogonies and their accompanying mythologies offer an architect that

orders an existing, chaotic material. With the introduction of the ex nihilo this chaotic matter

disappears. Therefore nothing pre-exists creation, there is no before and no outside of

creation. But at the same time nothing itself disappears, precisely because it becomes the

possibility that there is something. For Nancy, nothing does not pre-exist creation, it is

creation. Creation is the gift that, giving itself, erases the position occupied by an agent or

power. In one single gesture Nancy thus retraces creation and nothing, the first being simply

the emergence of what is already there, the latter designating not a register of privation, a

stage of the world prior to intervention by a producer, but rather the void that coexists with

something and from which it cannot be detached. It is not therefore a matter of following a

movement from nihil to quid, but of acknowledging the surprise, the growth of nothing as

something. If the world is not produced on the basis of a prior something, but is rather a

circulation of sense, then this contingency is precisely what film responds to, acknowledges

and relaunches. It is in this sense that cinema opens up the world’s logic from within the

world: the passage of sense or sense as passage. Nancy phrases this in terms of a blind spot:

to see the world means precisely to acknowledge the blind spot this vision originates from.

Talking about the work of Claire Denis—whom Nancy visited on the set of L’Intrus (2004)—

the philosopher writes, “What immediately struck me was the choice of the image. The

decision of the point of view. There is certainty from the camera, the shot, but it is founded

on nothing; there is no criteria of choice” (CTL, n.p.).

The filmmaker’s vision then is not a view upon the outside, the world does not stand

before him, as a resource to be exploited. Rather the world imposes its contingency upon the

point of view that frames it. As Nancy puts it, “the ‘blind spot’ does not deprive the eye of its

sight: on the contrary, it makes an opening for a gaze and presses upon it look” (EvF, 12).

4. Do you see that?

The decision of the point of view follows the logic of contingency, which means that

it cannot be assumed on the basis of an external principle, but neither can it be thematized as

the site of a representation. We can know very little about this decision; all we can do is

acknowledge its consequences. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s film Je Veux Voir

(2008) achieves this exactness as partiality precisely by showing cinema as the accumulation

of a series of blind spots. The film was shot in the aftermath of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict

that heavily damaged the southern suburbs of Beirut and the south of Lebanon. The work is

predicated on the impossibility of showing, and thus of finding visual evidences, that would

found and support acts of memory, and therefore provides a reflection on cinema as a praxis

and thought of the blind spot as an exact relation to the world.

The title itself immediately points to a will, the intention to discover something by

ocular inspection. As soon as the film starts this will is frustrated. The film opens with the

shot of a woman standing in front of a window with her back to the camera, so that she is

revealed to the audience only as a black silhouette. The people that are talking around her

seem worried. She only says three words, “I want to see.” She is quickly rebuked by what one

can assume to be her agent, who tells her that she won’t be able to see what she imagines.

There is essentially nothing to see. The first blind spot is thus evident right at the beginning

of the film; there stands a tension between a desire to see and the alleged impossibility of

seeing what one imagines, of finding a match in reality for one’s imagination. The look will

have to lend itself to the real, and throughout the film the woman will see very little, almost

nothing. What is meant to be a film about witnessing (the destruction of the war, the situation

of the country, the traces left by a conflict) turns out to show mainly a series of shots of a

man and a woman in a car.

By the time the initial conversation is over we discover that the woman standing by

the window is Catherine Deneuve, a film star. This revelation introduces a second blind spot,

that between fiction and factual reality. The presence of Deneuve, who we know as the face,

body and voice of so many fictional characters, introduces an element of fiction in a film that

is above all in search of facts and visual evidence. In particular, in those scenes where

Deneuve herself rather than the seer becomes an object offered to the inspection of various

bystanders, the impression is that we are watching, as we have done many times, a film with

Catherine Deneuve. We are watching a film in which the famous actress plays a character

traveling around southern Lebanon and chatting with her driver, played by the Lebanese actor

Rabih Mroué. The film does not, however, completely escape into the realm of fiction, as if

the reality that is offered to the two characters is too marked by the history of conflicts, by

catastrophe, to allow for a fiction to emerge. At the same time, though, this reality also does

not offer enough self-illustration, enough facts to explain what has happened and how; it

remains essentially phantasmagorical. What we see of this reality (the cleared-out sites, the

rubble) is either merely a glimpse in the reflections on the car’s windows, or is shown, but

abruptly halted in the name of security; for example, in one scene the camera is forced to stop

recording and the screen turns black. The film thus remains in this blind spot between a

fictional excess and a factual poverty, without trying to balance the two. The blind spot

however also haunts the character played by Mroué, who is caught in a blind spot to the same

degree as, albeit in a different way than, Deneuve. At some point the couple travels to

Mroué’s native village of Bint El Jbeil. Here the actor looks for his grandmother’s house

amid the rubble. However the place looks so completely transfigured that no trace can be

collected, the house can’t be located.

Finally the film shows how the blind spot belongs to the reality the film is framing.

Mroué’s final monologue makes this clear. As the camera tracks along a yard where trucks

and forklifts lift and shift debris, the voice of the actor says:

You wanted to see. I also want to see, but I can’t seem to. Do you see that? I told you they are moving the rubble from the suburbs, they dismantle all the bombed-out buildings and destroy them completely. They stack the rubble in trucks and empty it here, on the seashore. Do you see? We can’t recognize anything. We can’t distinguish the hall from the dining room, the kitchen from the entrance, the bedrooms from the bathrooms. Just stones, all mixed up. It’s like a town that had to be discarded, hidden, buried under the sea… In a short time the town will rest underwater, silent, mute. And we have already begun to forget it.xlvi

In many ways this film is exemplary of Nancy’s ideas of exactness and partiality: it relates to

the singularity of the world it frames precisely by foreclosing the possibility of representing

this world as completely intelligible, a mere subject to the film’s framing devices. The world

framed by the film also constantly exceeds this framing. By remaining caught in a series of

blind spots the film forces the audience to accept a form of blindness, an incommensurable

partiality that produces an exact relation with the real it realizes. The film fails to offer any

explanation, it is in fact animated entirely by this impossibility of providing accounts, origins,

causes and motives. In this way, however, it also succeeds in the difficult task of making

itself inappropriable, in being a vision that cannot be instrumentalized. It remains, as it were,

the recording of the creation of a moment of the world, a regard for a moment that is already

being forgotten.

5. Conclusion

To conclude, I return to some initial remarks in order to emphasize how the

divergence between Merleau-Ponty’s and Nancy’s approaches to film might be revealing of

more all-encompassing divergences. One could be tempted to see the differences between

Merleau-Ponty’s and Nancy’s arguments as dependent on historical circumstances: writing

later than Merleau-Ponty, Nancy has been exposed to more and different developments

(technological and contextual) in cinema. In other words, it is possible to imagine that

Nancy’s thought on film owes its features to cinema’s recent developments, developments

that Merleau-Ponty, whose writings only cover the first sixty years of cinema’s history, could

not account for. In the aforementioned passages, Merleau-Ponty insists on cinema’s inability

—so far—to fulfill its promise. Merleau-Ponty writes that “cinema has yet to provide us with

many films that are works of art from start to finish…there have scarcely been any films that

are entirely filmic” (WP §4/97-98). In “The Sensible World and The World of Expression”

he repeats that, “film is still as far as ever from offering us all that we might have expected of

it” (IPP 19/79).

On the other hand, Nancy writes that Kiarostami’s work is a return to the very

beginning of film, a beginning marked by the release of a look on the world and the reception

of the pressure the world exercises. Nancy writes that the renewal of cinema is actually a

return to its origin, its renewal is a coming “close again to what it is,” the making visible “of

a conspicuous form of the world” that does not, however, “yield a conclusion” (EvF, 12).

Films today are forms of presentation that “they had indeed also been since the beginning”

(EvF, 18).

This question of history and beginnings is important because it shows that what is at

stake here is not so much the progress of cinema that Merleau-Ponty could not witness, but

an approach, a fundamental and divergent understanding of film.

Merleau-Ponty invokes the hope for an “entirely filmic” film, without however

specifying what this could amount to. It is possible to assume that an “entirely filmic” film

would be something that provides an answer to Merleau-Ponty’s question on perception, or

rather, and more generally, it would be a film that validates the question of perception as

elaborated in a particular philosophy. An “entirely filmic” film would perhaps be close to

Bazin’s idea of “total cinema.”xlvii For Nancy, on the other hand, it is the very nature of

cinema as incomplete art, with its inability to fulfil the myth of total cinema, that becomes

cinema’s most precious resource. If it is true, as I have described, that partiality also produces

an exactness—inasmuch as it does not capture the world, but releases its sense—then the

exactness that Merleau-Ponty decries could be, as is shown by Nancy, the advantage of film

as opposed to its pitfall.

In other words, Merleau-Ponty is looking at cinema to provide a different inflection, a

different intensity to his work on perception. Throughout the conceptual moves of Film and

the New Psychology one detects in Merleau-Ponty the attempt to find an illustration of his

philosophy through cinema. His insistence on cinema’s representation of movement, his

reference to the slow motion scene in Vigo’s Zéro de Conduit (Zero for Conduct, 1933) and

its effect of derealization,xlviii and his return to notions of montage and global rhythm, all seem

to point to cinema as a fleshing out of Merleau-Ponty’s central concerns. For Merleau-Ponty

cinema is essentially another apparatus of perception, one that serves to amplify by negation

the findings of what he calls “a figured philosophy of vision” (PrP 18/168). For Merleau-

Ponty cinema is reduced to the “needs of philosophy” and is inevitably inadequate to serve

them, since it is lacking in development and at the same time excessively rooted in its own

purity. Nancy, on the other hand, detects in cinema a resistance to a certain understanding of

philosophy, a productive limit where philosophy is called upon to acknowledge its own

inadequacy and has to start again, by rubbing against a world whose sense cannot be

guaranteed but only adored in its constant emergence. Nancy is looking at cinema as a way to

“take care of the real,” a gesture that aims at unsettling philosophy. For Nancy, therefore,

cinema is not simply a way of looking, but a matter of “regard for the world.” It is a conduct,

an ethos, and not just a problem of visual perception. Cinema’s exactness as partiality,

accumulation and collaboration of blind spots, becomes then a crucial feature in cinema’s

attending to the world in its constant creation and the multiplication of possible world-forms.

Merleau-Ponty writes, about Descartes, that “a closer study of painting would lead to

a different philosophy” (PrP 26/171). It seems reasonable to ask whether a different study of

cinema—one that takes exactness and partiality to be resources and scenes of instruction for

philosophy—could have led Merleau-Ponty himself to a different understanding of

phenomenological reduction and perhaps of the work of philosophy itself.

i See, e.g.: V. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); L. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); J. Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (London: University of California Press, 2009); S. Cooper, The Soul of Film Theory (London: Palgrave, 2013).ii M. Merleau-Ponty, “Exprimer l’homme par son comportement visible,” in L’art du cinéma, ed. P. L’Herminier (Paris: Seghers, 1960), 141. Hereafter AC. All translations of AC are mine.iii See O. Fahle, “La visibilité du monde. Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty et le cinéma,” in Gilles Deleuze. Héritage philosophique, ed. A. Beaulieu (Paris: P.U.F, 2005), 123-143.iv D. Andrew, “The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Film Theory,” in Movies and Methods, vol. 2, An Anthology, ed. B. Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).v Sobchack, Address of the Eye, 3.vi H. Fielding, “Merleau-Ponty,” in Film, Theory and Philosophy, the Key Thinkers, ed. F. Colman (Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2009), 88.vii M. Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).viii M. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), translated by A. Lingis as The Visible and The Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 173/133. Hereafter VI. For all Merleau-Ponty texts, references follow the form [French pg#]/[English pg#].ix J. Derrida, On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, tr. Christine Irizarry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).x Sobchack, Address of the Eye, xvii.xi Ibid., xvii.xii Ibid., xvii.xiii Ibid., 13-14.xiv Ibid., 22.xv Ibid., 43.xvi P. Rodrigo, “Merleau-Ponty : du cinéma à la peinture. Le « vouloir-dire » et l’expression élémentaire,” in Merleau Ponty de la perception à l’action, ed. R. Bonan (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 2005), 127.xvii Sobchack, Address of the Eye, 293.xviii Ibid., 4.xix F. Dastur, “World, Flesh, Vision,” in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty's Notion of Flesh, ed. F. Evans and L. Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 40.xx M. Merleau-Ponty, L’œil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), translated by J. Edie as “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 13/162. Hereafter PrP.xxi O. Fahle, “La différence entre l’image et le visible. Merleau-Ponty et la théorie de l'image des médias contemporains,” in L'empreinte du visuel: Merleau-Ponty et les images aujourd'hui, ed. M. Carbone (Genève: Metispresses, 2013), 20.xxii Ibid., 21.xxiii Ibid., 23.xxiv B. Labé, “Le cinéma selon et à l'insu de Merleau-Ponty,” in L'empreinte du visuel: Merleau-Ponty et les images aujourd'hui, ed. M. Carbone (Genève: Metispresses, 2013), 144.xxv M. Merleau-Ponty, Psychologie et pédagogie de l’enfant: Cours de Sorbonne 1949-1952 (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2001), translated by T. Welsh as Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 215/168. Hereafter CPP.xxvi M. Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens (Paris: Nagel, 1966), translated by H. L. Dreyfus as Sense and Nonsense (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 20/14. Hereafter SN.xxvii M. Merleau-Ponty, La nature: notes, cours du Collège de France (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), translated by R. Vallier as Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 154/114.xxviii P. Rodrigo, “Merleau-Ponty: du cinéma à la peinture,” 124.xxix Ibid., 124.xxx M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), translated by D. Landes as Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2012), 81/69-70. Hereafter PhP.xxxi For competing interpretations of this, see, e.g.: M. Carbone, The Flesh of Images: Merleau-Ponty between painting and cinema, tr. M. Nijhuis (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015); Rodrigo, “Merleau-Ponty : du cinéma à la peinture.”

xxxii M. Merleau-Ponty, Causeries (Paris: Seuil, 2002), translated by O. Davis as The World of Perception (London: Routledge, 2004), §4/98). Hereafter WP.xxxiii C. Zernik, “‘Un Film ne se pense pas, il se perçoit’. Merleau-Ponty et la perception cinématographique,” Rue Descartes n°53/3 (2006), 103.xxxiv Ibid., 104.xxxv M. Merleau-Ponty, Résumés de cours: Collège de France 1952-1960 (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), translated by J. Edie et al. as “Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952-1960,” in In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 19/79). Hereafter IPP.xxxvi J.-L. Nancy, The Evidence of Film, tr. C. Irizarry (Brussels: Yves Gevaert, 2001), 14. Hereafter EvF.xxxvii J.-L. Nancy, “Could it be that cinema itself is contemporaneity?”, in Cinema. Thought. Life. Conversations with Fata Morgana, ed. R. de Gaetano and F. Ceraolo (Cosenza: Pellegrini Editore, 2007), ebook, no pagination. Hereafter CTL.xxxviii D. Rugo, “The Patience of Film. Cavell, Nancy and a thought for the world,” Angelaki 20:4 (2015), 23-35.xxxix J.-L. Nancy, Adoration. The deconstruction of Christianity II, tr. J. McKeane (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 76.xl J.-L. Nancy, The Possibility of A World: Conversations with Pierre-Philippe Jandin, tr. T. Holloway and F. Méchain (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 25.xli J.-L. Nancy, The Sense of The World, tr. J. S. Librett (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 24.xlii J.-L. Nancy, Adoration. The deconstruction of Christianity II, tr. J. McKeane (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 48.xliii J.-L. Nancy, A. Barrau, What’s These Worlds Coming to?, tr. T. Holloway and F. Méchain (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 54.xliv J.-L. Nancy, The Creation of The World or Globalization, tr. F. Raffoul and D. Pettigrew (New York: SUNY Press, 2007), 68.xlv J.-L. Nancy, Corpus, tr. R.A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 99. xlvi Je Veux Voir, Directed by J. Hadjithomas and K. Joreige, performances by Catherine Deneuve and Rabih Mroué, Mille et Une Productions, 2008.xlvii A. Bazin, What is Cinema?, tr. H. Gray (London: University of California Press, 2005), 17xlviii Carbone, The Flesh of Images, 54.